Will your users love you right from the beginning? You have to test your interfaces to get the answer for that question. Our design at our UX company is heavily based on research, so we need a ton of test participants to do user testing. Sometimes there are no specific requirements for the participants. In other cases the project needs special prerequisites even for basic user testing. For example it’s hard to test a site for avid video game players without actual gamer experience. All in all you need a system to make sure that you get users for your test and you get the right ones.

How do we get our participants?

Although it would be tempting to just grab a few beers with my buddies and fiddle with wireframes drunkenly – that would defeat the purpose a bit. Your friends are a lot more like you than you think and always testing with the same people is not the best way to get results. The same is true for colleagues. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than not testing at all. But there are a lot of people out there who are really interested in your ideas, You just have to invite them and listen to them. They are motivated and open about new things. Of course we also have incentives, but it’s not about only that. Most of our testers could do without the small incentives we provide them.

What are our strategies?

• We do the recruiting ourselves. It’s good to know who is interested in what you are trying to do. When done right, recruiting shouldn’t be much of a hassle you just got to have good sources.
• Good screeners are a must. In large scale recruiting even a small questionnaire can be enough to get some information about your applicants. This makes sure that the tester has a minimal knowledge about a certain topic and they are motivated enough at that point to even fill out the questionnaire. This is the first thing to prevent the “not showing up” phenomena.
• The second part of the screening can be a little conversation, a “mini-interview” over the phone. In this way you can get to know your applicant a bit more and this can also increase the turnout rate.
• Where to look for motivated participants? Anywhere, really. You can do some guerilla testing in a coffee shop or you can post an ad in any social media site. You can get a lot of participants and that’s why the screeners are important. For example Budapest has a great foreign community who can provide an interesting perspective in any project.
• This way we can be sure that our participants are generally motivated and they want to share their experience.

The shocking truth

You got to have stable basic processes behind recruitment and research to uncover the “shocking truth” about your usability problems. Recruitment is not revolutionary, but you will rely on that during the whole journey. Of course, some parts of the processes should be tailor made in every project. But a good best practice that comes from real life experience can help any project immensely. And that is exactly what we can bring to the table.

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